


A Cure for Insomnia

by thesignsofserbia



Series: A Study in Nightmares [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Denial of Feelings, Domesticity, Episode: s03e03 His Last Vow, HLV, Hurt/Comfort, Lack of Communication, M/M, Mostly Platonic, Nightmares, Pining Sherlock, Platonic Cuddling, Romance, Sharing a Bed, Sherlock Holmes and Feelings, Sherlock Is Emotionally Constipated, Sherlock Loves John, Sherlock is sad, Unrequited Love, not really platonic at all to be honest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-08
Updated: 2015-05-08
Packaged: 2018-03-29 13:32:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3898141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesignsofserbia/pseuds/thesignsofserbia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock finds it odd that he doesn’t find it odd. It’s not the first time this has happened, and it probably won’t be the last, he muses, with John’s chest pressed flush against his back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Cure for Insomnia

**Author's Note:**

> Set in the nebulous time in His Last Vow between Sherlock being in hospital and Christmas at his parents'
> 
> I have incorporated this story into a series with A Study in Nightmares and Cracks in the Veneer, They're all completely stand alone, they're not even consecutive, but they follow the same themes.

 

 

Sherlock aggressively flipped onto his back in frustration. He’d been lying there for three quarters of an hour and it was _pointless_. Dull. Boring. Tedious. Uninspired.

He couldn’t sleep.

Granted, it wasn’t a shocking development, he’d had periods of insomnia his whole life, when he bothered to go to bed at all, sometimes tending to fall asleep without warning somewhere odd, or in the middle of something, much to John’s amusement. God to think of all those times he’d deliberately avoided sleep, and when he actually needed to; his transport stubbornly gave him nothing.

It didn’t help that the flat was particularly cold this time of year and his room always seemed to bear the brunt of it, he wasn’t sure why (perhaps there was an experiment to be conducted there). John was out with Graham so he hadn’t lit the fire or done whatever it was that he did to warm up the place.

Sherlock didn’t like the cold, especially not after his time abroad.

It was very still and there was nothing to distract him from sleeping (which he wasn’t), nothing to focus on, to occupy himself with.

 

Anyone who has spent an entire night awake inexplicably; betrayed by their own body, will tell you that it comes with a rather unique sort of feeling, one that’s very hard to describe. It comes on gradually, growing stronger as time ticks by infinitely slowly, as the chances of getting to sleep decrease more and more. It’s not quite hopelessness, not that drastic, but you do feel bereft of… _something_ , something elusive.  
It’s an awful feeling, intangible and petty, the lack of any substance or weight to it instead makes it worse rather than better. It's hard to justify why it bothers you, and you grow steadily more uncomfortable as you lie there, a discomfort no extra pillow will alleviate.

 

Sherlock knows that in the morning he will look back on this and dismiss it as ridiculous, he will be irritable from lack of sleep and a bit worn out, but perfectly alright. But he doesn’t feel perfectly alright in this moment, instead he feels a very vague type of dread.

Something about the darkness amplifies his distress, and he can’t shake the feeling that the situation is dire. It’s not the absence of light itself that bothers him, if he were to switch on the lamp, the blackness would recede, but the heaviness in the pit of his stomach would not. No, if anything he’s always found the dark oddly comforting.

Nights like these, just have an element to them that he can’t define, it’s not a Danger Night, and nothing occurred to bring it on; yet he still cannot sleep and he feels slightly disturbed.

In moments like this he can almost (almost) understand how some, less logical people, refer to this sort of time as the witching hour. Strange things tended to happen that would never occur in the daylight, decisions and perceptions influenced by sleep deprivation.

Sherlock considers giving up entirely and finding something else to occupy himself with, but he can’t think of a single thing to do, besides, he’s too tired to accomplish anything constructive.

So he doesn’t; he does nothing.

 

~

 

The front door bangs shut with a bit more force than it normally would, and John tromps up the stairs (Mrs Hudson will probably have something to say about it in the morning). Shuffling sounds filter down the hall from the living room, it’s sometime after 1am and John is a little intoxicated.

John’s been drinking noticeably more than he ever had previously (when living with Sherlock at least), before Mary lodged a bullet into Sherlock's liver. Not too much exactly, just…more.

Sherlock rolls over and glares at the wall, he craves a cigarette.

John finishes pottering around upstairs, and in the bathroom and wherever else.

He pads into Sherlock’s bedroom, wordlessly lifts the duvet and slots himself in behind Sherlock. A protective arm snakes its way around Sherlock’s chest. John, despite everything hadn’t expressed any strong feelings either way about sharing Sherlock’s bed.

Sherlock finds it odd that he _doesn’t_ find it odd. It’s not the first time this has happened, and it probably won’t be the last, he muses, with John’s chest pressed flush against his back.

 

~

 

When Sherlock had been discharged from the hospital, he'd noticed that John had been living in 221B (avoiding Mary) when he hadn't been at the hospital. John hadn't asked for Sherlock's permission to move in, but he wasn't remotely bothered about that, he never would have said no, it was as much John's flat as it was Sherlock's (even if he no longer lived there).  
It felt right to have him home. 

John had spent a lot of time nagging Sherlock to eat, to take his pain medication, to let him check how the wound was healing (Sherlock mostly preferred to take care of it, he’d gotten used to patching himself up) and also to sleep. Though the badgering was probably partially inspired by any residual guilt left over from the shooting.

John had started checking on him in the night, Sherlock knew because most of the time he was awake and occupied or feigning sleep. He wasn’t quite certain if his act managed to fool John, being a Doctor and everything, but if he had noticed he never called Sherlock out on it. And Sherlock never mentioned John’s night time visits, besides, he checked on John as well.

It was definitely co-dependant, maybe even A Bit Not Good, but Sherlock had never cared about that, and for them it had been a difficult few…well, _years_.

Perhaps it was not normal to wake from a nightmare (they were more memories than dreams, these days) and have to ascend the stairs, legs trembling, because you needed to make sure your flatmate was breathing, that he hadn’t vanished into thin air in his sleep.  
Perhaps it was not normal that you to _had_ to do this, just to keep yourself sane.

But apparently people didn’t have arch enemies ‘in the real world’, apparently it was not normal for most people to experiment on cadavers and fake their own deaths and, it was generally not tradition (as far as Sherlock could tell) for the bride to shoot the best man and then leave him for dead.

He'd been all but dead for just over 2 minutes, so technically she had murdered him, the surgeons had given up, even called time of death. But Sherlock didn't feel inclined to share this particular piece of information with John, which in all likelihood wasn't normal either.

So normal was relative. And this had become normal for them.

 

~

 

Sherlock had never liked sharing a bed with anyone, it was distracting.

He and his brother both had been born (cursed) with abnormally heightened senses, and Sherlock was very attuned to them.

As a child he had often found the massive input of raw data and stimuli to be overwhelming, sometimes painful. He had spent hours curled up at the very bottom of the big heavy wardrobe in the guest room, with his hands clamped firmly over his ears.

Over time he had learnt to control the flow of information into and (importantly) out of his mind.

 

The less data available to him, the greater the possibility was that he would be able to shut his brain down enough to get some sleep. It was for this reason that he maintained the strict organisation of his bedroom, in stark contrast to the ‘utter chaos’ of the rest of the flat (he knew where everything was at any given time, it wasn’t his fault no one else could comprehend his system).

 

So having someone in such close proximity when he was trying to rest naturally tended to have the opposite result of ‘lulling him to sleep’.

The sound of a person breathing was the worst part, once he had noticed it he couldn’t help but fixate on the rhythm, trying to match it to his own, which almost never worked, screwing up his own breathing pattern as a result (it sounded like nothing, but it was _infuriating_ ). It was the little things, in the end that kept him awake at night.

It was easy to block out the world if he was busy working or in his mind palace, he experienced very little of it's influence (which John had capitalized on when he had gone through an incredibly juvenile phase of balancing things on him while he was focused inward. Once he had been frustrated when he went to pull his magnifying glass from his coat pocket only to discover a fork that John had placed there earlier).  
But his mind palace contained too much information to be useful to him in catalysing the sleeping process.

Every minute shift or faint noise that his bed-mate uttered would rouse him, and he would lie awake for hours, irritated, not wanting to move in case he woke them up (people were, without fail, even more unpleasant to spend time with if you’ve woken them up, in his experience anyway).

He had spent time on the street. He had slept rough when he was younger and…more recently. He had certainly not spent all of his life in luxury (unlike Mycroft, the git). But he would swear blind that a stranger’s bed can be far more uncomfortable than sleeping on the streets, even if they are not in it at the time.

 

~

 

It had started 3 weeks ago when they were still dancing about and checking on each other in the night, pointedly ignoring the topic of John’s wife. He was still technically married and hadn’t decided what to do about that, or his approaching entrance into fatherhood.

Sherlock wasn’t sure if he’d bought the _‘we can trust her, she saved my life’_ line yet or not. Admittedly he'd rather contradicted himself by going into cardiac arrest shortly after having said it. He wasn’t sure if it was a good idea, but it may be John’s only hope of finding a way to forgive Mary, thus attaining the family he had desired.  
Sherlock felt he had to give him back that option, given that it was partially his fault (if by proxy) that this chance at happiness had been snatched away.

Sherlock personally had forgiven Mary, She had done what she thought she had to do to protect herself, and to keep John Hamish Watson in her life.  
He could relate to that.  
It wouldn't even have been a bad way to go. That wasn't to say that he considered her to be trustworthy, and threatening him in the hospital, then a second time at Lennister Gardens hadn't really helped her case.

 

It had been about 10pm at night and Sherlock was in the kitchen conducting a very sensitive experiment involving a pair of ear-drums, an obscure type of snake venom and liquid nitrogen.

In his defense, he actually _had_ eaten that day, so his blood sugar was _fine_ thank-you-very-much and he would never have intentionally ruined the experiment, (It is no easy thing acquiring liquid nitrogen) so he was also taken by surprise. But the last few nights his dreams had been especially…unpleasant…and as a result he hadn’t had any decent sleep to speak of in about 6 days.

So he had managed to collapse from sheer exhaustion half way through the experiment, as in, properly unconscious.

When he came to, John was hurriedly trying to extract him from where he was lying in the kitchen, surrounded by a lot of broken glass, various instruments and a suspiciously frozen looking banana. Thankfully both the snake venom and the liquid nitrogen had been contained (mostly. If you ignored the banana).

He had been disorientated for a moment, his brain trying to fill in the blanks between conducting the experiment and waking up on the floor. The usually steady John, John who thrived in stressful situations, was clinging to him, his fingers latched on like claws to his arms (it would bruise) looking incredibly alarmed.

 

Sherlock hadn’t said anything about the fear in John’s eyes because he understood. John had seen Sherlock _fall_ , without warning, crashing loudly and violently onto the table, before pitching sideways off his stool. It had been sudden, and John hadn’t been expecting it, John couldn’t have known that Sherlock was unhurt (and he really could have been).

John had been afraid for his best friend’s life.  
And Sherlock understood how that felt.

Once John had established what had actually happened, he was cross, and shouted at him for being 'irresponsible' which Sherlock thought was unfair given that it was hardly his fault. But it was okay because Sherlock knew John wasn’t really angry with him, if anything he was relieved. Sherlock had started making more concessions for John recently.

He had forced Sherlock to go to bed with his usual no-nonsense doctorly concern but when he came back an hour later to check on him he found that Sherlock was still awake.

“So it’s not that you _won’t_ sleep; it’s that you _can’t_ ,” John concluded. He was just about right; it was possibly a bit of both.

 

~

 

He had been so bone-weary after not having slept for days, that when John suggested the idea of sleeping together after his impromptu nap in the kitchen, he’d just regarded him through one tired eye (the other being inelegantly smushed into the pillow at the time) and shrugged noncommittally. John had been frankly astonished that he was even still conscious, but he had, in fact, paid very close attention to what was said next.

John had explained that when one of ‘the lads’ in Afghanistan had suffered from a nightmare, couldn’t sleep or was simply terrified, they would often sleep close together for comfort. It wasn’t always selflessly either, they relied on one another to survive from day to day, and it was dangerous if even one of the group wasn’t fully alert. But the safety in numbers idea and the pack animal instinct worked in their favour, humans are inherently social animals, Sherlock knew, and group psychology had clearly proven useful in that situation.

John almost never spoke about his time in the army, and Sherlock wondered how many of the men he had slept alongside at night and comforted, had been blown apart or shot right in front of him.

Sherlock was perplexed when it did actually seem to work rather well for them, and so it became a regular occurrence for John to climb into Sherlock’s bed in the night. A few times, when he hadn’t, Sherlock had fallen asleep at the top of the stairs, back against John’s door; the times when he didn’t know how to ask.

 

 ~

 

They hadn’t taken any cases since Sherlock had been in hospital, but they were okay, if a bit overwhelmed. For the first time since he could remember, Sherlock was content to do nothing; he had no desire to work.

It was strange.

But they both needed life to slow down for a while and give them some breathing space, a lot had happened and they (John anyway) needed some time to catch up.

 

Sherlock knew that the current peace (John’s reaction to the saliva filtration experiment in the flour none-withstanding) was a sham, and that they were in the eye of a rather ferocious storm. This was just a brief respite before the carnage to come.

John and Mary had to make an important choice and Sherlock wasn’t sure yet which way that decision would go, or which way _he_ wanted it to, that, and they would inevitably have to do something about Magnussen.

But Sherlock didn’t want to think about any of that. He wanted to ignore it all, to stay safe in their little bubble of denial, just he and John: ignoring the rest of the world.

 

~

 

That being said, it certainly wasn’t perfect. There were the slightly unpleasant puffs of John’s breath on the back of his neck, a small patch of Sherlock’s skin warming when he exhaled, then cooling again, over and over.  
Right now there was the faint stale scent of sweat and lager, perfume and cigarette smoke from the bar he’d just come from, lingering in his hair.

 

But he was warm in the cold room, and Sherlock found the embrace surprisingly amiable; the firm pressure of his arm around his chest and the sturdy weight of John’s body next to him reassured him making him feel grounded.

Sherlock was content with where they were in relation to each other. John had always been infinitely more tolerable than regular people, a stabilising force in his life.

They had certainly never been lovers, and yet, the way John was holding him wasn’t exactly platonic. It wasn’t particularly sexual though, either, but it was incredibly intimate. There was something about the nature of John’s embrace that, to Sherlock felt like more than just a simple comforting gesture, it had an air of familiarity and affection to it that made it pleasant.

Sherlock felt…he felt… valued.

It wouldn’t have been something that Sherlock would have tolerated from anyone else, not at this point in his life.

He found John Watson intriguing; he had done from the very start. He had come to the hypothesis, based off of the reactions from those around them, that he and John’s association was an unusual one, even for close friends, especially in areas concerning devotion and loyalty.

The depth of his regard for John was unprecedented, and it concerned him, but despite that, he couldn’t bring himself to regret it. Whatever disadvantage his…fondness, for John may bring him; he would never be a weakness and Sherlock would never consider him so, John Watson was Sherlock Holmes’ greatest asset.

 

~

 

At some point John’s well-being and happiness had become, not just _important_ to him, but inherent to his own.

So when John had broached the topic of Sherlock being his best man, well, how could he refuse? Sherlock always considered weddings to be a ridiculous and expensive social construct, and would never have imagined himself attending one voluntarily, especially not in any significant non-case-related capacity.

But, his involvement in this turned out to be integral to John being happy, so he had relented without a fight, and had become absurdly entrenched in the planning of the event (he still wasn’t entirely sure how that chain of events had come to be), distracting himself from the implications of, and subsequent consequences that would be brought about by the actual wedding itself.

If Sherlock was honest with himself, he’d acknowledge that he was at least partially… subconsciously, aware of the _real_ reason he hadn’t wanted John to get married (aside from the personal convenience of John’s accessibility, and the fact that he really, _really_ did not want to give that disastrous speech), and that it was the same reason he’d left the wedding early, the reason he’d relapsed and moved John’s chair; the reason he’d thrown himself from the rooftop of a four storey building…

 

But he’d never claimed to be an honest man.

 

So he had been somewhat perplexed, when he was working in the lab one afternoon and he and Molly were discussing the upcoming nuptials. He had mentioned to her that John had asked him to be his best man and she had not reacted favourably.

“ _He did what?!_ ” She asked, uncharacteristically cross, “How could he ask that of you?” She appeared to be shocked and offended on his behalf.

Her outburst confused him, John had said that he was his best friend and it was customary for a groom to ask his best friend to be his best man, was it not? What was bad about that, and why was she acting as though John had insulted him by asking?

“I don’t understand.”

This stopped her in her tracks and she stared at him.

“Oh, _Sherlock_.” She murmured, and there was a great deal of sadness in her tone, which he must have somehow misinterpreted.

She had neglected to explain herself, and left for ‘her break’ soon after. She’d already taken her lunch break an hour ago.

The sympathy in her eyes echoed itself upon the faces of others, with increasing frequency as the wedding approached, even from _Mycroft_. It was infuriating and no one would tell him why.

After the event, he would come to understand that his subconscious had been protecting him in stifling the reason. If he had just let it be, it may have saved him a great deal of pain.

 

~

 

The co-habitation of the (Sherlock’s? _Their_?) bedroom experiment had mixed results. There were points to support its continuation, But there were also drawbacks ( not to mention John kept appropriating Sherlock’s favourite pillow).

If nothing else, it was eventful.

 

There had been times when he’d been very glad to have John next to him, like the time he’d woken from a dream and hadn’t been able to force the air into his lungs fast enough. John had been there calmly as Sherlock gasped desperately for breath, eyes wild, convinced he was drowning. Stoic in the face of Sherlock’s fear, John had provided him with something solid to hold on to, and he had, fists bunched into John’s night-shirt.  
As he’d calmed, John had pulled him close, facing him until they were curled around each other with Sherlock’s forehead tucked against John’s sternum. Sherlock had panted into him, inhaling John’s scent deeply before sleep dragged him under again.

John had known exactly what to do, he hadn’t said a single word, he didn't ask if Sherlock wanted to talk about it (he didn't) and didn’t bring it up the next morning. They both had their demons now.

 

They rarely woke together, which helped to maintain the pretense that it wasn’t happening at all. At night they never spoke, as if that would break the spell and force them to acknowledge it, this way they could go on ignoring it, which was preferable to a potentially very embarrassing and awkward discussion.

The exception to this happened one morning when Sherlock had woken late to find himself sprawled on top of John, having draped himself over the smaller man completely in the night. He had been mortified when trying to extract himself, he came face to face with John, who was wide awake and extremely amused.

 

One time he had overheard John crying, though it had been unclear if he was awake. Sherlock had listened to the ragged, muffled sobs as they tore their way through John’s throat and carried on going, right through Sherlock’s heart. Sherlock wasn’t good at this, care-taking did not come naturally to him the way it did to John, and he was unsure how he could possibly help.  
He’d gradually shifted over until they lay close together on their backs, and he gently nudged his head onto John’s shoulder; a reminder that he was not alone.

 

A memorable occurrence had been the night that John had rudely woken Sherlock up…by _laughing_ in his sleep. It had been one of the stranger (and more endearing) John Watson moments that Sherlock had experienced.

But that was quickly cancelled out by the time he caught ( _heard_ ) John mumbling Mary’s name, and Sherlock had decided that he wasn’t actually tired at all and that he would go for a walk instead. At four o’clock in the morning.

 

Another time John had woken him up by starting to get up to relieve his bladder very early in the morning. Sherlock’s brain had come online with a bang, irrationally deciding that John was an intruder and he was being attacked. As a result, Sherlock had kneed him so hard in the abdomen that it had knocked him clean off the bed and left him wincing a bit for a few days after. Sherlock was sure that the bruise had been impressive, John had not been pleased.

 

More than once, Sherlock had sprung from the mattress and skidded out of the room in excitement, having just had a thought or an idea that was brilliant and couldn’t wait. John hadn’t appreciated this either.

Frequently though, John’s being nearby prompted no results at all and Sherlock often labelled such nights a lost cause. They didn’t do it every night either. This didn’t stop Sherlock from finding that John had gone ahead and invaded his space anyway, appropriating the bed regardless, every now and then.

He didn’t mind.

 

Once, John had placed a quick kiss on his temple as a goodnight without thinking, and rolled over, before he realised his mistake with an awkward clearing of his throat. Sherlock held very still and pretended to be asleep, feeling like a poor substitute.

 

It did something strange to Sherlock’s gut when he saw that at some point, John had quietly added some of his own clothes to Sherlock’s dresser. He was much less annoyed by this than he should have been. It made practical sense that John keep some clothes downstairs.  
The fact that he then, a short time later, took the time to clear out some old clothes had nothing to do with anything. The incidents were unrelated. It was a co-incidence that this freed up the space for more of John’s things.

It was fine.

It was all fine.

 

~

 

One night, as he lay tangled in John, an awful and wonderful revelation materialised, seemingly out of thin air.

He loved him; he was in love with John Watson.

He deleted the thought, eradicating every hint or trace of it from his hard-drive

 

~

 

 _Finally_ , John’s presence beside him started to have an effect, as he felt himself relaxing, and leaning back into him, John’s soft snoring failing to deter him at all, Sherlock was actually very comfortable.

 

It didn’t work every night, but it did more often than not, and that was better than nothing.

 

This couldn’t last forever, Sherlock knew that. Eventually John would make up with Mary, and go back to her, to his real family for the sake of their daughter if nothing else. Mary could provide a great deal more for John than Sherlock Holmes ever could.

 

Or…maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he wouldn’t leave at all. _Maybe he would stay_.

 

Sherlock didn’t know which outcome would eventually be chosen, but for now John was here, and that was all that mattered.

 

 

 


End file.
